Entertainment for the Recovery Community
Hundreds of books have been written to
help people in recovery navigate twelve-step programs. Salish
Ponds Press does not publish any of them.
Recovering people and those who associate
with them are are taught "to place principles before personalities." It
is the personalities, however, who make the recovery process both so
maddening and so entertaining. Salish Ponds books celebrate the
personalities. In them you meet the drunks, the counselors, the street
people, the professionals, the jokers and the thieves who gather in
places where recovery happens. If the novels are instructive it is
purely accidental. If any of the stories are true, it is the kind of
truth that can only be uttered in fiction.
Leopold Larson is back practicing law
again, and the Oregon State Bar is not happy about it. This time he is
sober, doing probate law, and getting his slips signed at a little
storefront place that isn't listed in the regular directory of AA
groups. It is tough AA where nobody holds hands and nobody ever says,
"My name is whatever, and I'm an alcoholic." Into Leo's office walks
Daisy Twill, the beautiful, buxom, hot dog vendor who could be an
heiress or a killer or both. The search for Daisy's inheritance and her
father, the Duke of Morrison Street, leads Leo to the earliest days of
AA in Portland, to an offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous offering a lot
more than sobriety, and into a showdown with the most powerful law firm
in the city. To survive the case and keep his license he will need all
his legal skills, a little luck, and a helping hand from a ragtag bunch
of inner city alcoholics.
Fiction - 298 Pages
$15.00 (
Kindle Edition $3.99)
ISBN 978-0-9824564-0-8
Order From AmazonOrder from Creatspace, (a subsidiary of Amazon, but Salish Ponds gets more of the money)
Also avaible from
Powells and
Barnes and Noble
Malady Manor
by Orrin Onken
The treatment center had a real name
but everybody who went there called it Malady Manor. It was the kind of
place where medicine, insurance coverage, and addiction meet to argue.
For one disgraced lawyer it is a second chance at life. He had barely
survived his alcoholism, and now he has to survive recovery. Malady
Manor is the story of how a cynical, atheist, ex-lawyer gets through
the sense and nonsense of addiction treatment. Desperate for answers,
yet highly skeptical that they can be found in the numbing routine of
addiction treatment, he slogs through the program, the counselors and
the psychobabble. His oasis in the recovery desert is other addicts;
people just as scared and screwed up as he is. The story is both his
own and the story of every person who has found him or herself facing
the ceiling at night from the lumpy mattress of residential drug and
alcohol treatment. If you are going there, or have been there, or
simply want an evening of fun learning what it is like, Malady Manor is
for you.
Read First Two Chapters of Malady Manor on line.
Order Through CreateSpace
ISBN 978-0-9824564-1-7
Order Through AmazonFiction - 216 Pages
$15,00 (
Kindle Edition $3.99)
The Alcoholic in Detective Fiction
The literary novel is not dead . . . it is resting. Until it wakes up,
people have to read something, and for a lot of us that is
detective fiction. A person doesn't have to work
too hard at detective novels. The problems presented in detective
fiction
are all subject to rational solution and you can count on
finding that solution some time before the final page. The
detective--a moral knight in less than shining armor--sallies forth to
defend the innocent and drag the guilty to the natural consequences of
their evil deeds. What could be more comforting?
Fictional detectives tend to drink. Some are
responsible drinkers. Sue Grafton's Lindsey Millhone with her
occasional
glass of white wine is one of those. Some detectives are
hard drinkers. Robert Parker's Spenser comes to mind. Some detectives
are drunks. C.W. Sughrue qualifies in Crumley's drinking
classic, The Last Good Kiss. And some detectives
are alcoholics.
The difference between a drunk and an alcoholic is that alcoholic's
have to go to meetings. Or at least they know they should be going to
meetings. Alcoholics love drunks, but drunks don't like alcoholics
much--mostly because alcoholics make drunks think they ought
to be
going to meetings.
Alcoholic detectives run the gamut of recovery. Jack Taylor, in Ken
Bruen's, The Guards, sees
meetings in his future, but hasn't arrived yet. Dave
Robicheaux, in James Lee Burke's series regularly attends
meetings on route to dethroning the evil doers. The full
range appears in Lawrence Block's Matt
Scudder. In When the
Sacred Gin Mill Closes, Scudder
pursues his alcoholic bottom and the bad guys with equal noir intesity.
In later volumes he gets sober, relpases and eventually finds some
peace in AA.
Alcoholics are moralists and romantics. They await a world in which the
evil are punished, the good are rewarded, and life's problems have
solutions. They know a world like that will never arrive, but they wait
for it
anyway because the alternative is unthinkable. Noir fiction, with its
troubled heroes, its damaged victims, and its grimy reality, make the
wait a little easier. Detective novels are romances for people don't
know how to be romantic, and until the literary novel awakes, detective
novels will do just fine.
